Saturday, May 12, 2012

Windows 8 Tricks: Uninstalling Hidden Application Packages

It turns out that you can get into a situation where you can’t install an application on the current Windows 8 Consumer Preview from the Windows Store even if you can’t find that application anywhere in your Windows start screen. According to the UK MSDN Team, this can happen when an application is not uninstalled properly for some reason. What happens then is that when trying to install the app again, the OS finds records of the app being installed already so it doesn’t allows you to install it again.

Remember that for Windows 8 applications, everything will be installed as packages, which will be downloaded from the Windows Store. Right now, developers can use Visual Studio to create packages for sharing applications while on the Consumer Preview version. Because of this, developers need to be able to install and uninstall packages on demand.

The good news is that there’s a way for you to install and uninstall packages by commands, even if you can’t do it from the Windows Start screen or from the Control Panel. Follow the next steps to get it done.

Make sure you have the Administrative Tools enabled (Right Swipe from the right border, click on settings and then on enable Admin Tools).

Run the Windows PowerShell command prompt. Remember you need to run it as administrator (you can run it from the Start screen, which will take you to desktop mode. Then you can right click on the Windows Bar and pin it to the taskbar. Then you can right click on the taskbar app icon and run it as administrator )

Type the following command: help appx. This will display the help for the appx command. You will see the list of commands to add an application package, get an application package or remove an application package.

Execute the required command followed by the location and name of the application package, and you are done.